I use the tag redux to signal that the topic of a previous blog post is being revisited, reinforced, and repurposed. The choice of title for this one could easily have gone instead to Your Brain on Postmodernism, Coping with the Post-Truth World, or numerous others. The one chosen, however, is probably the best fit given than compounding crises continue pushing along the path of self-annihilation. Once one crisis grows stale — at least in terms of novelty — another is rotated in to keep us shivering in fear, year after year. The date of civilizational collapse is still unknown, which is really more process anyway, also of an unknown duration. Before reading what I’ve got to offer, perhaps wander over to Clusterfuck Nation and read James Howard Kunstler’s latest take on our current madness.
/rant on
So yeah, various cultures and subcultures are either in the process of going mad or have already achieved that sorry state. Because madness is inherently irrational and unrestrained, specific manifestations are unpredictable. However, the usual trigger for entire societies to lose their tether to reality is relatively clear: existential threat. And boy howdy are those threats multiplying and gaining intensity. Pick which of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with whom to ride to the grave, I guess. Any one will do; all four are galloping simultaneously, plus a few other demonic riders not identified in that mythological taxonomy. Kunstler’s focus du jour is censorship and misinformation (faux disambiguation: disinformation, malinformation, dishonesty, gaslighting, propaganda, fake news, falsehood, lying, cozenage, confidence games, fraud, conspiracy theories, psyops, personal facts), about which I’ve blogged repeatedly under the tag epistemology. Although major concerns, censorship and misinformation are outgrowths of spreading madness, not the things that will kill anyone directly. Indeed, humans have shown a remarkable capacity to hold in mind crazy belief systems or stuff down discomfiting and disapproved thoughts even without significant threat. Now that significant threats spark the intuition that time is running perilously short, no wonder so many have fled reality into the false safety of ideation. Inability to think and express oneself freely or to detect and divine truth does, however, block what few solutions to problems remain to be discovered.
Among recent developments I find unsettling and dispiriting is news that U.S. officials, in their effort to — what? — defeat the Russians in a war we’re not officially fighting, are just making shit up and issuing statements to their dutiful stenographers in the legacy press to report. As I understand it, there isn’t even any pretense about it. So to fight phantoms, U.S. leaders conjure out of nothingness justifications for involvements, strategies, and actions that are the stuff of pure fantasy. This is a fully, recognizably insane: to fight monsters, we must become monsters. It’s also maniacally stupid. Further, it’s never been clear to me that Russians are categorically baddies. They have dealt with state propaganda and existential threats (e.g., the Bolshevik Revolution, WWII, the Cold War, the Soviet collapse, being hemmed in by NATO countries) far more regularly than most Americans and know better than to believe blindly what they’re told. On a human level, who can’t empathize with their plights? (Don’t answer that question.)
In other denial-of-reality news, demand for housing in Sun Belt cities has driven rent increases ranging between approximately 30% and 60% over the past two years compared to many northern cities well under 10%. Americans are migrating to the Sun Belt despite, for instance, catastrophic drought and wild fires. Lake Powell sits at an historically low level, threatening reductions in water and electrical power. What happens when desert cities in CA, AZ, NV, and NM become uninhabitable? Texas isn’t far behind. This trend has been visible for decades, yet many Americans (and immigrants, too) are positioning themselves directly in harm’s way.
I’ve been a doomsayer for over a decade now, reminding my two or three readers (on and off) that the civilization humans built for ourselves cannot stand much longer. Lots of people know this yet act as though concerns are overstated or irrelevant. It’s madness, no? Or is it one last, great hurrah before things crack up apocalyptically? On balance, what’s a person to do but to keep trudging on? No doubt the Absurdists got something correct.
/rant off